Feminism: Barbara Tuchman on Women Workers

Peasant women could hold tenancies and in that capacity rendered the same kinds of service for their holdings as men, although they earned less for the same work. Peasant households depended on their earnings. In the guilds, women had monopolies of certain trades, usually spinning and ale-making and some of the food and textile trades. Certain crafts excluded females except for a member’s wife or daughter; in others they worked equally with men. Management of a merchant’s household— of his town house, his country estate, his business when he was absent— in addition to maternal duties gave his wife anything but a leisured life. She supervised sewing, weaving, brewing, candle-making, marketing, alms-giving, directed the indoor and outdoor servants, exercised some skills in medicine and surgery, kept accounts, and might conduct a separate business as femme sole. [emphasis mine]

This is your regularly scheduled reminder that (a) women have, as a general rule, worked throughout the entire history of the world and that the myth that "working women" -- i.e., women working outside the home (as though work inside the home somehow didn't 'count') -- is a new phenomena is largely just that: a myth, and that (b) women's work has consistently been devalued not because the work is not important but because it is a woman who is doing that work.

This is also your regularly scheduled reminder that (c) the devaluation of women's work needs to be meaningfully addressed in our society. And the sooner, the better.

When I see people talking about how 'men hunt the mammoths/do everything worth doing, women laze about and eat bon-bons' (manboobz lurkers represent!) I'm left with two possible conclusions. Either the 'mammoth hunters' are grossly ignorant of human history or they are talking about a very specific type of person when they say 'woman'. A 'woman' in their parlance isn't someone who identifies as a woman, but a person who stays home and eats bon-bons. Which is to say, my vaunted ancestresses who worked on farms (or does that count as 'in the home'? what if the women are selling eggs or quilts or whatever?), worked in cotton mills, were midwives, and took in laundry even in their old age, weren't women. I find it interesting that farming was a perfectly acceptable career for men, but apparently their wives and daughters were just helping, even when the women were the main people involved in some project (quilting/crocheting/etc for sale--in some cases from raising the sheep all the way to the finished sweater).

So, massive classism fail in assuming Leave it to Beaver was an accurate account of women working through the ages.

My mother was a stay at home parent for most of my childhood. In high school when asked what my parents did for a living, I proudly announced that my mother was a self-employed accountant, home manager, child-care expert, nurse, (and several other things too numerous to list). Before that getting-to-know-you session, my mom and I talked about just how much work it was to be the one who stayed home and how little society respected it. I was a budding feminist at the time and read in one of the dozens of books that if you paid someone to do all that work, it would bankrupt even the Rockefellers.

My mother was a stay at home parent for most of my childhood. In high school when asked what my parents did for a living, I proudly announced that my mother was a self-employed accountant, home manager, child-care expert, nurse, (and several other things too numerous to list). Before that getting-to-know-you session, my mom and I talked about just how much work it was to be the one who stayed home and how little society respected it. I was a budding feminist at the time and read in one of the dozens of books that if you paid someone to do all that work, it would bankrupt even the Rockefellers.

What kills me is the degree to which I've internalized that idea, that my own work as a woman and SAHM isn't as important as my spouse's paid work outside the home (and I don't think I'm alone in this). I often get to the end of the day and my first thought is, "oh well, I didn't do much today" until I start thinking through the day and realize how much I did and how many hats I wore. It frustrates me that I have to make a conscious effort to value the work that I spent all day doing. Entry #76736 in "why I need feminism."

I got into a "discussion" in a pub the other night about the fact that most fantasy writers can spend three years researching crossbows but don't bother to include ANY women (even as tiny tiny mentions! that they exist! that they ran the giant castle your characters are running around in!) and how it's totally bogus.

Working women and their contribution/devaluation is actually what I'm doing my honours thesis on so I destroyed the guy with my argument, but still. It's why I love Tamora Pierce with the fiery passion of a thousand fiery suns.

I got into a "discussion" in a pub the other night about the fact that most fantasy writers can spend three years researching crossbows but don't bother to include ANY women (even as tiny tiny mentions! that they exist! that they ran the giant castle your characters are running around in!) and how it's totally bogus.

Working women and their contribution/devaluation is actually what I'm doing my honours thesis on so I destroyed the guy with my argument, but still. It's why I love Tamora Pierce with the fiery passion of a thousand fiery suns.

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